Gauvin Bailey: Central European Artists and Architects in Colonial South America: From Bohemia to Patagonia

Gauvin Bailey: Central European Artists and Architects in Colonial South America: From Bohemia to Patagonia

On 23 March 2011 Gauvin Bailey, Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art from the University of Aberdeen explains why is the architecture and decor of the Southern Cone of South America distinct from the rest of the continent: it showcases the Rococo style, in contrast to the heavy Baroques of the rest of Latin America. Rococo’s presence in the region can be credited almost exclusively to the influx of Central European architects and designers into the region. Trained in the Rococo style artists from Bohemia to Swabia brought a distinctly Germanic flavor to the churches of present-day Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Germanic influence was also crucial in Brazil, where it arrived second-hand thanks to an enthusiasm for Germanic Baroque in Lisbon, but also first-hand when Germanic designers established themselves in the Amazon missions. But by far the greatest number of German-speaking architects and artists to work in one place—fifty at a time in the 1740s—were active in Chile.

Attached file: 20110323_Bailey.jpg

Attached file: 20110323_Bailey.pdf

After receiving Ph.D. in Fine Art History from Harvard University (1996) Gauvin Bailey taught undergraduate and graduate students in Early, High, and Late Italian Renaissance art, Baroque art, and Latin American art at Clark University, Boston University, and Boston College. In addition, he curated/co-curated and served as a consultant on museum exhibitions on Italian Renaissance and Baroque, Latin American, and Asian art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, and the Worcester Art Museum, among others.

Bailey just completed two new books: The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), a study of colonial architecture in Southern Peru and Bolivia that combines indigenous iconography and symbolism with that of Catholicism and the International Baroque, and Baroque & Rococo, a thematic survey of art and architecture in Europe, Latin America, and Asia from 1570-1780 (Phaidon Press Limited, expected 2011). He is currently working on a new book for Ashgate Publishing Limited called Spiritual Rococo: Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Paraguay on the impact of a theology of "happiness" in French and Iberian literature on the proliferation of Rococo arts and architecture not only in France, Italy and Central Europe but also in present-day Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/hoart/staff/details.php?id=g.a.bailey

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